Travel south from Kiev along the arbored R-12 highway and you will see perhaps the most public symbols of Ukraine's rampant corruption: a wide array of luxurious estates that have sprung up in Koncha-Zaspa, a leafy suburb of the capital. Many of these multimillion-dollar homes belong to senior state officials with only modest salaries.

Ambassador Wolfgang Ischinger, European Union Representative, Kosovo Troika “Kosovo: Challenges and Prospects”  Please join us for a sudden opportunity to hear Ambassador Wolfgang Ischinger discuss the current situation in Kosovo while he is briefly visiting Washington.

Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski introduced Dr. Vaira Vike-Freiberga, the former president of Latvia.  He spoke of Vike-Freiberga's strong leadership for the vision that the concern for the “interests of a single country is in the interests of all,” whether one is talking about security, economics, or values.  Vike-Freiberga picked up that theme in her remarks, drawing from the lessons of her life and her country’s.

Former Latvian President Dr. Vaira Vike-Freiberga delivered the second annual Christopher J. Makins Lecture, hosted by Ambassador Jonas Hafström at the House of Sweden. She was introduced by Dr.

Aleksander Kwasniewski, president of Poland from 1995 to 2005, spoke to an overflow crowd at the Atlantic Council on the subject of "Electoral Drama in Poland, Ukraine and Russia." While dismissing the notion that these are truly "dramas," arguing that they are merely normal events in an evolving political situation, he acknowledged that the outcomes of all three elections a

Ukraine is facing a considerable challenge from corruption, which our research showed is presentin nearly all levels of government and politics, the judiciary, and business.

"Ukraine’s Foreign Policy After the Elections" Former Foreign Ministers of Ukraine Borys Tarasyuk,  Kostyantyn Gryshchenko, and Hryhoriy Nemyria, foreign policy advisor to former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, discussed the direction foreign policy is to head in the wake of the Orange forces' narrow victory over the ruling Party of Regions and its allies in September's pa

Sergei Khrushchev, astronauts, and one of America’s leading inventors crossed swords in a high-level argument over what it was about Sputnik in 1957 that changed the world – and whether the U.S. needed another shock to its system to once again gain traction in science, engineering, space and ultimately global competitiveness.  

In the past year, Russian President Vladimir Putin has morphed from a noisy irritant to the West who was reaching the end of his two-term limit to a swaggering antagonist who isn't going away. At least that's the view of senior Bush administration officials, who increasingly see Russia as a rising strategic challenge.

Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns told a standing room crowd at the Atlantic Council, including several former U.S. Ambassadors to Turkey and the current Turkish Ambassador to the United States, that we have reached a "critical juncture" in U.S. –Turkish relations and that we must take bold steps to "restore the primacy of Turkey as a strategic partner."